Dudley says he didn’t see it coming. But before dawn on the morning of Sept. 12, the lean, bearded 64-year-old Army veteran was suddenly pummeled by a fellow resident at the group home he lives in on Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff.

The supposed friend didn’t stop there; he stabbed Dudley with a screwdriver while they were having a smoke at the back of their residence, which houses around 35 clients on the second floor of a walk-up off the busy street.

A police report confirms Dudley’s story, which he calmly repeated to me last week. Larry Johnson, the broad-shouldered, longtime owner of the Jefferson House operation, assured me the assailant, who suffers from schizophrenia, is no longer there.

No one at Jefferson House knows where he is now. But everyone knows this: Both men suffer from mental illness, and one of them almost ended up dead. If a staffer hadn’t intervened, Dudley could have been on his way to the morgue.

Welcome to the world of group homes, many of which do business in north Oak Cliff.

I’ve spent much of the past several months interviewing residents and operators of various homes. The common ingredient in each facility is clients who suffer mental illness. What the state classifies as “severe and persistent mental illness.”

The designation differs from “developmentally disabled,” which is today’s term for mental retardation. The distinction matters for more than diagnostic reasons.

Those suffering from mental retardation, which starts before adulthood and affects skills such as speech development, are eligible for a fairly decent stipend from the state for medical care. The payment runs about $132 per day, thanks to a Medicaid program that covers residents in supervised facilities.

The money finances attendants who care for clients. And recipients get medical services at their homes.

That’s not the case for those like Dudley, who get hit later in life with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or some other mental illness that affects their reasoning abilities. They get money from the federal government to cover housing, but they receive a big fat nothing from the state for medical care in their homes.

They could get help, though, if Austin thought smartly about mental illness. Here’s what I mean:

Medicaid funds also are available for mental illness. Legislators would have to spend some state dollars to qualify for the federal investment. But there’s money available if they look at the link between mental illness and violent crime.

Numerous studies show a correlation between the two, so it would make sense to pay for the Medicaid program from the $2.5 billion the state pays annually to incarcerate prisoners. Taxpayers could save on prison and jail costs by cutting down on the type of violent crime Dudley experienced. The state pays about $48 a day to house prisoners, while Dallas County pays about $55 a day to cover its inmates. The state’s share of Medicaid spending for mental illness would likely be about $27.

People like Dudley, and the man who stabbed him, certainly would benefit. The operator of Dudley’s group home says he would use the money to hire a nurse to be on the lookout for problems before they fester.

Others I’ve talked with believe group homes should hire social workers, who could engage residents and hook them up with other services, including day programs that train workers for relevant jobs.

Each improvement would be like manna for those who suffer from mental illness. One of the saddest complaints I’ve heard is how many residents at marginal group homes just sit around smoking on stoops, wandering the streets or bumming money at convenience stores.

Dr. James G. Baker, who heads Metrocare Services, a mental health provider, explained that you don’t find many people with mental retardation in homes like that. They have money to get better care.

Why can’t we get the same quality care for people like Dudley? Mental retardation and mental illness may be different categories, and affect people in different ways, but they deserve equal treatment.

William McKenzie is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist and moderates Texas Faith at dallasnews.com/texasfaith and The Education Front at dallas news.com/educationfront. His email address is wmckenzie@dallasnews .com